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Bing !

As an SEO I’m always interested in how the major three engines are playing against each other. In this case (and finally) a Microsoft attempt at a search engine seems to be working in both the direction of marketshare as well as in the actual results and how they’re displayed.

I’m going start by noting that the advances Microsoft has made in the way of their attitude towards search as is reflected in Bing as well as the giant leap forward they’ve made in their algorithm are both impressive. The results are cleaner, the interface is cleaner, and Microsoft comes across looking … well … cleaner. Like maybe they’re trying to build a solid engine and not just scrambling in futility to catch up to Google.

Whether just a spike due to curiosity or a reflection of things to come, Bing is taking market share from both Google and Yahoo! which show that at least people are interested in taking a peek. The real loser here is likely to be Yahoo! Google’s results are still better but those who are Yahoo! users may well find the results better over at Bing and the homepage and results pages cleaner (common word I seem to be using).

According to StatCounter the market share is:

Google decreased from 78.68% to 77.94% (-0.74%).

Yahoo decreased from 11.46% to 10.76% (-0.7%)

Microsoft (Bing, MSN Search and Live Search) increased from 7.4% to 9% (+1.6%)

This is the first time Microsoft has seen gains in ages.

Also to their credit, the description and sitelinks that appear when you hover over a result are great.

The future of Bing is still an open question and with tens of millions more in marketing dollars to come it’s going to be interesting to watch what they do next and how the public reacts.

As another note: they’ve just launched and have yet to have time to tweak their algorithm much based on the issues they find from user behaviorso I expect that over the next couple months we’re going to find significant improvements in their rankings.

I wouldn’t say this is any kind of Google-killer BUT I would say that they’re positioned to be a very solid player that could well take market share from both engines — let’s just hope they keep up the good work.

I’ll be interviewing a couple of the fine folks from Bing next week for my radio show (Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm on Thursday from 11am to 12 PST). Listen in if you’d like more details or download the podcast afterward.